My good friend Sonny, who edits this magazine, occasionally tells me with a smile on his face while shaking his head, “Dude, photographers are just weird.” I kind of agree. We aren’t the everyday mainstream worker bees. How could anyone normal look at the world the way a photographer does? We tend to experience things in a mostly solitary manner with flash power settings, EV values, and F-stops in our head. When photographing things alone with just you and your camera, daily life takes on a dimensional shape of color schemes, compositional elements, possible motion blurs (panning), and before the click even happens, the decid-uous duty of documenting what seems so important or compelling. “How will I capture this?” is foremost in my neurotic mind. After the click of the shutter, that previous thought soon becomes, “I hope I got it.”

High levels of trust in your processing lab plagues all this. And just for fun, throw in the physical ailment in the form of a backpack and its arsenal of lense arching your back in ways not meant for the human spine to be stressed upon (I especially feel sorry for you 16mm film guys). I’m not at a stationary desk, and I’m not straightening a tie. I’m in the trenches (so to speak) experiencing life in a way most people will never sense, witness or quite comprehend.

As a photographer, I’m part of my environment whether it’s rain, snow, sun or fog. I’m also in my head and by myself when the moment to shoot arises. Wherever I am in whatever part of the planet, be it snow, cement or bright lights projecting through pitch black, I want to capture it. That becomes my instinctive plea. We are the fucking lensmen (or lenswomen) with a long ass lens today, maybe a small wide-angle lens tomorrow. Just watch out for aggressive people who might want to kick your ass, like Sean Penn and Tommy Lee. They’ll win because us photographers are weird introverted sissies. But it’s all worth it, just as long as you fired back in time and got the shot.

“Kevin Jones, Barrett Christy, Peter Line and others eventually flew overhead in predictable scheduled night air traffic. After I decided I was tired of freezing, I ventured solo toward the lodge for a brief ride through a nice eight inches of powder away from the over-bright halogens into the darkened trees. My eyes adjusted accordingly. In the lodge, people with ooh’s and aah’s plastered on their faces watched a huge theater type screen affixed outside through foggy glass as I ran into the familiar face of Shaun Palmer (won the “Skiercross”, hands down by a mile). Oddly enough, he sporadically asked in his Palmerish demeanor, “Hey Carnel, where the fuck is the bathroom in this place!?” Then walked away. I pointed randomly…”